Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Is Pleasing, During The Day, To
Observe These Inconstant Phenomena; We See, As Night Approaches,
These Stony Masses Which
Had been suspended in the air, settle down
on their bases; and the luminary, whose presence vivifies organic
nature, seems
By the variable inflection of its rays to impress
motion on the stable rock, and give an undulating movement to
plains covered with arid sands.* (* The real cause of the mirage,
or the extraordinary refraction which the rays undergo when strata
of air of different densities lie over each other, was guessed at
by Hooke. - See his Posthumous Works page 472.)
The town of Cumana, properly so called, occupies the ground lying
between the castle of San Antonio and the small rivers of
Manzanares and Santa Catalina. The Delta, formed by the bifurcation
of the first of these rivers, is a fertile plain covered with
Mammees, Sapotas (achras), plantains, and other plants cultivated
in the gardens or charas of the Indians. The town has no remarkable
edifice, and the frequency of earthquakes forbids such
embellishments. It is true, that strong shocks occur less
frequently in a given time at Cumana than at Quito, where we
nevertheless find sumptuous and very lofty churches. But the
earthquakes of Quito are violent only in appearance, and, from the
peculiar nature of the motion and of the ground, no edifice there
is overthrown. At Cumana, as well as at Lima, and in several cities
situated far from the mouths of burning volcanoes, it happens that
the series of slight shocks is interrupted after a long course of
years by great catastrophes, resembling the effects of the
explosion of a mine. We shall have occasion to return to this
phenomenon, for the explanation of which so many vain theories have
been imagined, and which have been classified according to
perpendicular and horizontal movements, shock, and oscillation.* (*
This classification dates from the time of Posidonius. It is the
successio and inclinatio of Seneca; but the ancients had already
judiciously remarked, that the nature of these shocks is too
variable to permit any subjection to these imaginary laws.)
The suburbs of Cumana are almost as populous as the ancient town.
They are three in number: - Serritos, on the road to the Plaga
Chicha, where we meet with some fine tamarind trees; St. Francis,
towards the south-east; and the great suburb of the Guayquerias, or
Guayguerias. The name of this tribe of Indians was quite unknown
before the conquest. The natives who bear that name formerly
belonged to the nation of the Guaraounos, of which we find remains
only in the swampy lands of the branches of the Orinoco. Old men
have assured me that the language of their ancestors was a dialect
of the Guaraouno; but that for a century past no native of that
tribe at Cumana, or in the island of Margareta, has spoken any
other language than Castilian.
The denomination Guayqueria, like the words Peru and Peruvian, owes
its origin to a mere mistake.
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